Many Waters
an excerpt

BERLIN

Berlin in mid May was chilly. My plane arrived late in the evening, and I was surprised to find a city damp and cold from the rain. I was dressed in summer wear and had to flop open and rummage through my big luggage and find a sweater to wear before I got out of the airport. The administrator from the residency program, Margitte, was waiting for me at the airport holding a sign with my name on. I had studied German in high school and for a year in college, and for the six months before I came to Germany, I had been reviewing my German. I was hoping to perfect my German while I was there. Guten Abend! Ich bin Meg, Meg Schneider. OH hello, Meg. I’m Margitte from the Institute! Margitte was a warm and cheery woman, petite and with a wild blonde hair, more of an artist type than an administrator. She had brought the Institute’s car, and we piled my luggage into the trunk and the backseat of the small sedan and drove to the Institute which was located in the Mitte, an area that was beginning to develop as the center of the culture and art in Berlin. In her almost perfect English, she explained to me that I was the last of the five residents coming in for the three month summer residency. There was one writer, one composer, one dancer, and two visual artists this time around. Everyone at the institute were excited to have me there at the residency, and there were plenty of events, such as lectures and panel discussions and open studios, planned throughout the three months for me and other residents to participate in. They will be giving an orientation to all residents tomorrow after breakfast. They had a kitchen run by a professional chef, and the residents were given breakfast and dinner prepared freshly by the chef. The residents had to take care of their own lunch, and of course with the ample stipend you will be receiving, you should have enough fund for all your living and art expenses. The residency’s kitchen was famous for their gourmet meals, and people from outside could make a reservation to visit the resident’s studios and also dine with them. Wow. I would be served gourmet meals prepared by a chef everyday?! I smiled thinking back at the instant noodle soup I was used to having at my studio only days ago. I had a feeling I was going to like being here. I was given a bedroom in one of the shared apartments. I shared the apartment with another woman, a writer from New York. We each had a private bedroom with bathroom and shared the kitchen and living room. The writer was given an extra room in the apartment as her office where she could write and organize her things. Since I was a visual artist, I would be given a studio space which I was to check out the next day. The writer had already retired to her room, and I quietly settled into my room, unpacked my toiletry and took a quick shower. I was fatigued from staying up all night and packing the night before, but still I had been unable to sleep on the plane from the anticipation for what would happen at the residency and reviewing of my life back home. I listened to the rain that had started to fall again and the sound of the cars passing by from the street below and imagined the city in the daylight. And soon I fell into a deep sleep.

I fell in love with Berlin quickly. The city was a bit chaotic from the aftermath of the unification of the East and West Germany, and especially in the Mitte, where the institute was located, the past of the East Germany was apparent since it had been part of the East Germany before the unification. There were cheap apartments and buildings abundantly available, and many art galleries and cultural institutions had moved to the area and along with this cultural attractions, hip restaurants and cafés were opening up. There were still many funky buildings interspersed with ultra hip modern businesses, and I liked the diversity of the residents there. And funny enough, the graffiti on the wall of cheap apartment buildings made me feel at home. Just like Los Angeles! But what made Berlin exciting was the sense of hope for a new future. The whole city was dug up in one construction pile after another, but there was an excitement in the air. The city was being reborn, and the chaos and dust and the economic struggle that the unification brought on and the rest of the Germany was complaining about seemed not to bother Berliners. I was caught up in their excitement and loved the city.

But what made the city the most interesting for me was my residency program. I was given a beautiful studio with a small bedroom loft. I was puzzled why I was given an additional living quarter when this studio had all the amenities built into it, but soon I came to appreciate the friendship I developed with my roommate, Amy Chang, a Chinese American writer from New York. We would spend many nights reminiscing about life, relationships and the nature of creativity over glasses of wine, cheese and wurst, German sausage, and soon we formed a friendship that I knew would last our lifetime as well as an appreciation for German cheese and wurst. And then there was Erik. The painter from Amsterdam. Erik’s studio was right next to mine, and well, having a sleeping quarter right next to his would have been trouble. When I walked into the library of the Institute for our orientation meeting, I saw Erik, and I heart skipped a beat. He was spread all over the big sofa in the library in a body language that said the world was his oyster. He winked at me and said. Hey, you must be Meg Schneider. That’s a very German name for an American, no? He grinned mischievously and swept his fingers through his curly blond hair. Hey. You must be Erik from Amsterdam. Sensing my attraction to him and all the danger that it represented, I put up an instant resistance and my unconscious mind began to develop an offensive to insure that I will not fall for this Nordic charmer. Erik was a painter with a focus on large scale drawings. He created large wall installations where he drew the scenes of Nordic forest with charcoal and wet rags. The mythological forest was drawn in the style of masterful craftsman-ship that reminded me of Rembrandt’s drawings and abstraction expressionist paintings, and they were full of grand gestures and drips, but despite these sweeping and perhaps appropriative gestures, the final works, from what I can see in his catalogues, were sensitive and moving artworks. His style was the most unlikely love child of theses two styles and despite logic, they worked and he had much success with exhibits planned all over Europe. He was using the residency at the Institute to develop ideas for a couple of museum exhibits coming up in the fall as well as the exhibit in Berlin that will be the culmination of this residency. Yes. There was a show planned for the visual artists at the residency, and Erik and I were to do a two person show at the end of the three months at the Institute. That would be interesting, I thought. Our works couldn’t have been different in its material and the content, so I was curious how they will work against each other in one show.

I instantly set out to make plans for my work. I wanted to utilize the elements from German culture considering that I was in Germany. Continuing with my experimentation with dolls, I decided to work with children’s literature, the Grimm Brothers collection of folk tales, and decided to make a series of photos set in the German Black Forest, with myself dressed as characters from theses children’s books. I spent hours in the immense library of the Institute and re-read the familiar stories of Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Frog Prince, and attempted to read the German original versions to get the feel of reading it in its original language. Sehr schwerig. Very difficult! I decided to focus on Hensel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood. I liked the sense of curiosity and adventuresome qualities of the main characters in these two stories that led them to trouble initially but eventual triumphs. I liked how their adventure was parallel to the journey in life, and in a way my own life felt like the journey of these children in the story walking through the woods not knowing what was behind the trees and not knowing if they would get out alive from the witch’s house. They didn’t know what lay at the end of their walk through the woods. But the hero and heroine always succeded in overcoming the danger triumphantly, and safely got back to their lives and to their loved ones. Perhaps my life would turn out fine at the end, just like these stories. Even being thousands miles of away from Los Angeles, from Shawn, my life was affected by my reality back home. In our occasional phone calls, we talked about what we did in the preceeding week and talked about practical matters such as bills and birthday gifts to various nieces and nephews. He was not happy about me taking up this residency. I could sense that he was afraid that this length of time away from each other might shake up our already fragile relationship fraught with resentment towards each other. Or dissolve it in to a thin air. For me, the more time I spent away from home, the happier I was, and it was not even a question that I would take up on this opportunity. I took it as a gift from the universe to spend time alone, away from Shawn. But then, I wasn’t alone here. I met people everywhere I went. I was developing other bonds, and as I focused more and more on my art and friendships in Berlin, and without seeing him every night, Shawn’s existence started to slip from my mind. I would be startled to be reminded of him once in a while by his phone call or a message from him, and only then I would remember our relationship like one would remember a bad dream, a nightmare, and I would try it shake it off as soon as it came into my consciousness.